


Half the Conscience of Men

by Smaragdina



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Altered Mental States, Gen, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The fever burns under her skin and gives shape to the shadows that fall from the trees. She sees a thin and desperate man with torches at his back; a little girl, running through the woods, flowers in her hair; her sister, such a little girl, paint on her face marking out new ways of being. Running and running and never daring to look back. A tall man with the head of a deer, animals whose eyes peer out from transplanted skulls, a stag picked out all in blue constellations, the full moon swinging like a round and perfect slice of bone in the blue, blue sky." Ficlets about Etain, the Wild Hunt, the Green Pact, werewolves, transubstantiation, duty, destiny, and nasty sharp pointy teeth that are too long and backstory-heavy to put in my other drabble collection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The coming forth is always hidden in the skin of his enemies

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter titles are taken from the Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec, because I am a pretentious git.

If she’d been observant and clever, she would be dead. If she’d noticed the silence of the birds and the  _shuff_ of dried leaves under paws she would have turned, and it would have taken half her face off in the first lunge. It would have caught her jaw and throat in its mouth and  _wrenched_ , and she wouldn’t have a voice left to scream as it tore her open from sternum to navel. It would have been quick.

She’s not clever.

It’s not quick.

Something hits her back. Just a heavy impact, no pain, teeth scraping uselessly over boiled leather and Etain goes down. Her bow goes skittering out of her grasp. She twists half around and goes for a knife and its jaws are in her shoulder, teeth between the joints of her armor, and she screams and hits it in the snout –

(it’s a  _wolf_ )

(it’s a  _werewolf_ )

She hits it in the snout before it can twist and rip her arm off. Tries to get her feet under her. Because this is a  _werewolf,_ this is a man in animal skin, she’s fought this before, if she can just climb a tree and pray to all the gods it will howl at her from below and leave her alone –

She gets a foot planted in the earth to run – and then there are  _teeth_ and her leg explodes in a mass of pain. It bears her down. Its breath is rank at her back and she can do nothing but curl in a ball and try to keep its claws away from her face and her neck and her belly. Its jaws can’t find purchase on her armor. She’s not sure how long it lasts. She prays (to Sithis, to Mara, to _Y’ffre)_ , pressing her face to the cold dirt, until eventually it’s over – it tires of her, or it hears a noise, and it crashes off in the brush and leaves her there amidst the blood and the churned-up earth and the broken arrows from her quiver scattered around her like half-sketched runes in some old, interrupted ritual.

*****

It’s an hour or more before she can force herself to uncurl. Panic makes her stiff as a rusted hinge. Pain makes her freeze. There’s blood trickling down inside her armor from her left shoulder, but none of those wounds feel deep. But when she tries to put weight on her leg it  _shakes_ and she goes down cursing. And then the reality of everything hits her and the world swims and she goes away for a little while.

When she awakes, the moon is low and bone-pale in the sky.

Etain drags herself, step by crawling hopping unsteady step, to her camp where the rabbit she’d put on the fire at dawn is ruined and blackened. Undresses herself inch by painful inch. Does what she can. Her shoulder is a mess of scrapes. Her leg is a mess of mottled blues and blacks and deep, clean wounds. She doesn’t think it’s broken, but she hasn’t been particularly _clever_ lately. She cleans it, bandages it, curls up close to the fire so she doesn’t have to use it.

She has been attacked by a human in an animal’s skin; she needs more healing than she can provide. Etain looks at the stars, dim in the light of the waxing moon. She is a few days’ journey from Falkreath. Two, at best. One, if she can steal a horse; four or six or more, if she has to limp along on one leg and check her back, keep her bow ready for monsters come howling out of the trees and the past.

She sets out at first light.

*****

By sunset she’s shaking.

By sunrise she’s freezing, and her hands are numb on her bow, and she has to wrap them in bits of cloth to trick herself into thinking they’re good for anything.

By the following sunset she’s fevered and sweating through her armor and she can hear each and every heartbeat as it thunders between her ears.

She forces herself to make a fire and stumbles down next to it. The light prisms in her vision. She wants to stay, wants to sleep, sleep for a day or more, curl up like an animal in winter and burrow down in the warm dank earth –

Etain gets to her feet. Her leg is  _alight_ with pain but she’s checked it, obsessively, and it’s healing clean; her shoulder barely hurts, will leave no lasting damage at all. This is not the point of it. She is a day east from Falkreath. Two, if she’s unlucky. If she’s lucky she will only stop when she falls to her knees at the temple and purges the infection from her blood. She leaves the fire. She limps on.

She can hear the tread of animal feet in the forest around her, the calls of owl and wolf in the night. The wind has the smell of scat and fur and musk, blood, pinesap, water falling over stone. At sunrise she startles a raven from its nest, and it takes to the air in a thunder of wind and wingbeats; and the sunlight glances gold off its feathers, blinding, mad.

****

The sun never rises, though – not truly.

The light of day is blue.

Falkreath Hold is draped in fog, blue and wet and smothering. When Etain tries to find the horizon, solid impossible  _blue_ is all she can see.

(When they’d summoned the Wild Hunt in Valenwood, the fires had been blue.

When they’d summoned the Wild Hunt in Valenwood because the Thalmor were beating at the door, her sister had stood at the mouth of the tent with blue fire at her back. Etain hadn’t been able to see her face for the shadows. Just the mad light in her eyes. The white slice of her smile. The chanting had risen and fallen like waves or wind, and she hadn’t been able to see her little sister’s face.

“Hurry,” Aednat had said, “it’s almost starting.” As if it was something to _become_ , not a twisting and an ending. She’d smiled wider, Etain had sworn that the blue light had shone through her fragile mer form and spilled out through her mouth. Etain had backed away. Made up some excuse. _Lied._

Aednat nodded and smiled and took a step back through the flap of the tent, and as she did so the blue light caught in her hair and feathered it, and cast her shadow and transformed it; it had hollowed and made strange the bones of her face, and played about her fingers so they seemed as claws. It was not just about to start; it was already begun.

Etain had climbed a tree and watched all the woods come alight with fire and howling beneath her. Watched the light spill forth and the other Bosmer lose their shapes. The magic of the Wild Hunt was that it tapped into the pure _chaos_  that lived in bone and marrow, every possible mad combination of fang and feather and fur. Ancient Khajiit had a few set forms; ancient Bosmer had _infinite._ All savage. She had no name for the thing her sister had become.)

The shapes in the blue, blue fog are nameless as well. She sees men, beasts, wolves and bears and vultures; she shoots a wild arrow at a bandit chief only to find it stuck in a log with a knot in the shape of a snarling face. A twig cracks behind her, but she has learned her lesson and she does not turn. The light is fading. The lights of Falkreath burn in the distance. The fever burns under her skin and gives shape to the shadows that fall from the trees. She sees a thin and desperate man with torches at his back; a little girl, running through the woods, flowers in her hair; her sister, such a little girl, paint on her face marking out new ways of being. Running and running and never daring to look back. A tall man with the head of a deer, animals whose eyes peer out from transplanted skulls, a stag picked out all in blue constellations, the full moon swinging like a round and perfect slice of bone in the blue, blue sky.

****

She comes back to herself  _wild._

She doesn’t perfectly remember what Aednat was wearing when the Hunt took her and broke her bones into new shapes. Not linen or cotton, certainly. But it had been red; her little sister had always liked red, the color of fresh meat, the color of the undersides of the leaves of the tree where they’d once lived, the color of the sunset seen from the top of Falinesti.

The cloth that Etain picks out from under her bloody nails and from between her teeth is linen, or cotton, but it is red as red can be.

Her body remembers its shape. Her bones remember their proper lengths and configurations, and words rearrange themselves on her tongue so that she can speak in words instead of baser things. Her body remembers, but her mind does not. Only in snaps and flashes. The smell of fear. The earth under her claws. A little girl running from her, chasing her down, tearing her open amidst the gravestones that jutted from the earth like broken teeth. She’d cracked her spine between her jaws and never seen her face, and the blood had been hot and sweet on her tongue.

Etain winds the scraps of red cloth over and between her once-again-elven fingers.

She is no longer fevered.

She bends over, suddenly, and is violently sick all over a patch of swordferns.

*****

By the time she arrives in Falkreath, the blue fog has turned into a heavy, sheeting rain. It’s washed away all of her footprints. She’d followed herself back here, found the point when her tracks changed from elven to lupine, followed them west until they disappeared over stones where no man alive could track them. Followed them, even though they were vanished, all the way  _back_ to Falkreath. And the cemetery. The splash of dark-stained earth with torn cloth and fur, the little body being lowered into the dirt.

The child’s name was Lavinia.

(She is younger than Aednat was; she is not a Bosmer, she is smaller, the flesh of men tastes different than the flesh of mer, she was more innocent and her skin was paler and she did not paint her face, did not die by choice, and Aednat had died or good as died a long, long time ago)

They have caught the man who did it.  _Man,_ not woman. Or so the father believes. He sets his jaw and spits at the earth between their feet and directs Etain to the jail. And there she finds a man who is only a wolf walking in human skin. Hunger and desperation have made him thin, all bone and sinew. All teeth. When he looks at her, the hair stands up on her nape and the pain in her bad leg flares like a brushfire.

Etain bares her teeth.

 “I’m so sorry,” Sinding says. He nods at her leg. “But it’s you should be in this cell, not me.”

“I’ve done worse,” Etain snaps.

(It is only that she’s been  _herself_ at the time. She knows that this should make devouring the little girl  _better,_ and she feels like it makes it  _worse_ )

Sinding laughs. It’s hollow, bitter. To Etain’s new wolfish nose, the man smells of ash – dead fires, burnt bridges, blue flames on a summer southern light. Dead embers flaring to life. “Help me,” he tells her. “We’ll fix it. You killed the little girl, I made you kill her – let the gods sort out who owes who, we’re even. Help me fix it. For both of us.”

His bones wrench. Etain hears them crack. He leaps up as a wolf, out the roof the cell, and Etain calls on her wolf self and tears the door from its hinges and follows him; and all the stars watch her chase him like a thousand glittering, far-away ghosts.

*****

Aednat had once killed a Thalmor patrol all herself, and when Etain had arrived too late to help her she’d found her little sister wearing the Justiciar’s coat. Black, hood pulled high, buttoned to her chin. The sight had made something curdle deep in her gut. It was her sister wearing a monster skin, a monster hollowed out and filled with something beloved.

Running in the shape of a wolf, now, is to have that sickly fever-chill feeling inhabit every fiber of her being.

Etain is stopped by a stag who shines brilliantly as the flames of the Wild Hunt fires of long ago. She can see through him – trees, mountains, stars like legions of torches in the night. The points of his ghostly antlers are sharp and dark with something’s blood.  She sniffs; it smells like her own.

*****

Sinding pleads. She should not be able understand his voice, should only hear howls and snaps and snarls, but her ears aren’t fully  _elven_ anymore and the words are plain as ever.  _Sister,_ he calls her. He tells her that they are alike, that she bears the scars from his teeth, that the curse that runs in her veins is his; that they are hunters and monsters, together, that their blood is the same.  _Sister._ Sinding surely cannot see, high on his perch with the red moon at his back: Etain’s lip curls.

The only creature who could claim her as  _sister_  died in Valenwood at the base of Etain’s tree with her teeth bared, Thalmor fire in her feathers and fur, wild mad eyes reflecting the light of so many other fires.

She hunts him down. Two feet, not four. She has no desire to taste his blood, to take him into herself and let him live inside her skin anymore than he already has. She is unsettled enough in her own frame already; she does not need to let the flesh of another monster in.

She is cautious, this time; she is clever. Her arrow takes him clean through the left eye. It is quick.

 _Tear the skin from his body,_ Hircine had said –  _tear,_ and  _rip,_ nothing civilized. Etain makes the first cut with her knife but then uses her nails. Her hands. Sinding’s wolf hide comes away cleanly, as if there is nothing holding it on to his flesh but wet blood. It as if his body is trying to shuck his skin. Underneath, Etain finds muscle, fat, sinew. She holds her breath, but there is no man living inside Sinding’s wolf self, whole and naked and untouched – there is no one else, either. There is no hollowness, no emptiness, no _ghosts._ Just the familiar configurations of red and deeper red and slick, pale bone.

The wolf has infected him down to his heart. There is nothing of the man left.

She gathers the bloody, steaming skin in her arms and steps over the wet ruin of the carcass to stand before the Daedra of the Hunt. Hircine is impassive. The shadows of the cave coalesce at his back. They take on different shapes, echo new shapes around him. When Etain looks at him sidelong, he is a bear or a wolf with the skull of a deer; when she looks at him straight on, he is a man with a spear and great, branching horns; when she blinks, the horns resolve down into the body of a stag, the stag twists into the form of the wolf whose bite she knows well. When she looks away and finds the shadow he casts by the light of the red moon, she finds that it is small, and slight, and mer, and female and familiar. Etain shivers. Once again, she cannot see its face.

He takes the skin from her hands, and calls blue fire to his own, and reshapes it. Etain looks at the ferocity of that fire and wets her lips, tastes the last echo of Lavinia’s blood upon them. “The reason I ran,” she says, slowly (clumsily, because the words wish to come out as growls) “is because the Wild Hunt – you can’t change back. She’s not  _her_  anymore. I wouldn’t be me. This isn’t – being a werewolf isn’t –” She gathers herself and sets her jaw. “I ask a boon. I need to be sure I can always come back to myself.”

Hircine tilts his antlered head. “That depends on what you consider yourself to be.”

He hands the skin back to her. It is changed, now, twisted from what it was – armor, hard enough to withstand more than teeth, and the inside lining where a body will go is  _dark_ as shadow. Hollow. Infinite possibilities contained therein, ready to be unraveled from her bones. Etain takes it, takes a deep breath, closes her eyes; steps out of her old skin, steps into a new one.


	2. We are graves but not coffins

The moon is new, and the night is black. Etain meets with Delphine in the basement of her Riverwood hideout at midnight, and it is far too dark for anyone to be the wiser.

“You’ll need to crash one of Elenwen’s little parties,” says Delphine. Her hands are spread and she gives a slight shrug, matter-of-fact, apologetic. “You’ll need to infiltrate the Thalmor Embassy.”

Etain  _hisses._

It’s not a normal noise. It’s bestial, raw, not something befitting man or mer. She flees – up the stairs, between the buildings, into the woods and the mountains she knows so well, and the night is far too black for Delphine to follow.

*****

She maps the woods of southern Skyrim until she knows them as well as she knew every tree and river and stone in Valenwood. She learns the mountains and the rolling hills and the rustling leaves until she knows them as well as the calluses on her own two hands.

(Except for the nights when the moon is full and her hands are not her own; and she learns this, too, the taste of a wolf’s howl in her mouth, the taste of a man’s blood on her tongue)

Etain wanders in the woods, makes tracks across the length and breadth of the land. She does not venture north; she does not lay eyes on the walls of Solitude, on the high walls of the Thalmor Embassy beyond. She hunts her way across mountain and forest. The moon turns in the sky. The months slip by.

It is no matter. Elenwen hosts parties all the time. The Thalmor are nothing if not consummate entertainers, cultured,  _polite._ There will be many parties for her to sneak into. There will be many chances. Delphine requires her to play the righteous Dragonborn, but Delphine does not understand what this _means._

For Dephline also requires her to be the righteous  _Blade,_ the knife in the dark, striking at the heart of the Thalmor occupation – and Etain has known this, has done this, spent a lifetime and a lifetime ago in Valenwood  _living_ this. Her childhood in Valenwood was sharp as a knife. She spent her youth sniping Justiciars from the branches, running messages to the last of the Blades in their secret posts, smuggling the faithful and the targeted away under the cover of moonless nights. Killing and killing and killing and  _running_ whenever the Thalmor came too close. She has tasted Justiciar blood in her mouth, eaten Justiciar flesh in righteous religious fervor under a blood-spattered jungle canopy. She will  _not_ be able to face the same Justiciars during the day, in their halls, eating their food and laughing at their jokes. If she smiles, Elenwen will smell it on her breath, see gristle between her teeth. If Elenwen speaks to her, Etain will not be able to get a word out without  _cracking_ and shoving a knife or a fang into the soft hollow of her eye.

The Thalmor have taken  _so much_ from her, and she has spent all her childhood plotting their death, and she  _cannot_ go to their fancy parties and sit quiet and secret while they ask if she’d like more blood-dark wine. She cannot, she  _cannot._

Etain will never be able to explain this to Delphine.

She haunts the hills above Riverwood and Falkreath as she and her Bosmer brothers and sisters once haunted the treetops above their Thalmor-held cities. Sometimes she is herself. Sometimes she is a wolf, a werewolf, ragged and feral and wild. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference. This is the curse of her kind. She dreams of the Wild Hunt, when she sleeps – bodies twisting into new shapes, rage laid bare, red-stained teeth under a mad full moon.

*****

“I’ve spent so much time running,” she tells the mer, conversationally.

He gurgles something inarticulate in response.

She has him pinned with a dagger straight through the shoulder and into the soft dirt. He’s dying. The rest of his patrol is all dead. They lie neatly in a pile. She has stripped them of valuables, and of flesh – gutted them, carved away the best cuts of meat, for there is something about killing Thalmor soldiers that makes her  _still keep_ the Green Pact after all these years. She will drag them all into the road, later, and drape the bodies with their Justiciar cloaks. She will pin a note to the top of the pile.  _By my hand and seal,_ it will read: the same signature that the Thalmor ambassadors use on all their official paperwork. Let it never be said that she has no sense of humor.

“I’ve been running for most of my life,” she sighs. She watches the blood leak out of the last Thalmor solider’s mouth. Watches the arrow in  his chest rise and fall with the slow rise and fall of his breath. “I ran from the Dark Brotherhood when it fell to ruin in Cyrodiil. I ran from your people in Valenwood. I ran from  _my_ people, too. You know the Wild Hunt? You remember that story, a few years back, when the Wild Hunt happened a half-league south of Falinesti? I was supposed to be part of it. That was supposed to be me.” Etain frowns. “I spent the night running from my sister. She didn’t look like my sister anymore. If I’d been smart I would have shot her.” Her frown deepens. It cracks the red paint tracing the scars down her cheek. “I didn’t shoot her.”

The Thalmor soldier breathes. In, out. The air rattles in his lungs.

There’s blood on her hands (there if  _often_ blood on her hands). Etain licks it off, thoughtfully. A wolf howls somewhere in the distance. The forest is deep and dark and will be only deeper and darker at night, under the paltry light of a crescent moon. It is not so difficult to imagine that her sister has stalked her here – that she will come howling out of the woods in the animal shape that the Hunt had contorted her into. That her past has followed her all the way to this bitter land and cornered and treed her, again, with its talk of duty and its temptation of  _blood_.

Etain has been running for so, so long.

“I’m not a coward,” Etain says, voice sharp. “I’m just – practical.”

She glances sideways to the Thalmor soldier. He is dead.

*****

She haunts the forests like a wraith, and she spatters red on the leaves. Some of it is because she wants to, or because she might as well, or because she needs to eat, or because the blood is  _Thalmor_ and there is nothing sweeter. Some of it is because she is paid.

The Dark Brotherhood pays well.

She has never loved them, feels no  _devotion_ to them. She abandoned all cause and devotion and righteousness when she abandoned her sister a half-league south of Falinesti. But they pay well, and they welcome her home.

They ask little of her.

It is only murder.

Dephine wishes her to be a hero, something avenging, something wild and immortal like the Nerevarine or the Cyrodiilic Champion of long ago. Her sister and her kin in Valenwood, in her childhood, had wished the same but without applause: martyrdom, sacrifice,  _this is right_ overriding simple things like survival. But the Dark Brotherhood is  _all about_ survival. It has no politics. It has no idealisim, no cause. It is simply blood.

When she kills for them, she sleeps well. When she kills for them, she does not dream of the Wild Hunt, of the fires of the Justiciars in the ancient forest, her little sister smiling with primordial fires at her back and saying  _come, shed your skin, this is what we were born to do. We will kill them all._

That is, until the Brotherhood sends her north – into a miserable ruin where she meets with a miserable whining man. He presses gold into her hands. Speaks of politics, of glory for her  _dark family,_  of purpose and change on the wind.

He tells her, fervently, that he has hired her to kill the Emperor of all Tamriel.

That this is something like  _destiny._

That this will make her a hero and a villain and a god like all the songs and stories, that the Nerevarine and the Champion will pale before her name.

That this is what the Dark Brotherhood – what  _she_ – was  _born to do._

*****

She flees.

She is high in the mountains before she stops, gasping for breath, her heart hammering and the chill air a sharp pain between her ribs. Snow whips around her. The moon rises on the horizon. It is only half-full, on the breaking point of  _empty_ or  _full._ Etain looks at it and the wolf within her stirs, growls, subsides.

Whir of wings overhead. A dragon ruffles the air above her. It does not see her. It is just another hunter.

Etain licks her tongue over her teeth.

If she were wise, if she were worried about just  _survival,_ she would stay low. Slip back down the mountain. Camp in the forests where the snow is only a pale ghost in the treetops, return to the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary at dawn. Hunt in the woods, two-legged prey and four, fulfill contracts, stay alive. This would be the human, intelligent, civilized thing.

Etain keeps an eye to the moon and the sky and follows the dragon to its roost, high in the teeth of the mountains. She shouts it down. She shoots it in the back of the throat and it crumples and crashes to the earth at her feet. Its flesh quails and melts away when laid against the strength of her soul. That night, she lays out her bedroll and sleeps within the tent of its upturned ribs, cradled like a child.

*****

In Valenwood, the rebels had all dressed the same. Or near enough. The Thalmor had little patience or love for tradition, and so Etain and her brothers and sisters in arms had taken it up in both hands. They had made armor like the stories of old, rune-inscribed. They had made arrows out of the quills of monsters from deep in the jungles, bows out of flexible horn. All of it kept the Green Pact. All of it was lovingly crafted, purposeful, holy.

Here in Skyrim, she has done what she can. She wears little or nothing of wood, or cotton, or linen, or anything that grows. Her bow is mammoth-tusk. Her arrows are scavenged. She does the best that she is able. It’s not even conscious, anymore; it’s instinct, it’s  _what she is meant to do._

Etain stalks the marshes of Hjaalmarch for a fortnight and comes to Solitude with a heavy load of pelts, deer and wolf and bear. She does not have the skill to tan them herself. Nor does she have the skill to make the armor as the Valenwood smiths made it. But she remembers the method and the look and feel of the armor well enough. She leaves the blacksmiths of Solitude with detailed instructions.

When she returns, the armor is there, leather, gleaming.  _Old_ armor,  _Bosmer_ armor, spitting in the face of all that the Thalmor have twisted her people into being. The plates of the cuirass overlap like leaves. They make no noise when they slide over one another. They have made her a mask, as well, to hide her face from the Thalmor she kills. They have made her a cloak of dark grey wolfskin, very like the skin of the animal she becomes on full-moon nights or the skin of the thing her sister had become when the Wild Hunt broke open the forest like a cracked egg. The lining and the ties that bind the cloak are deep red. It is her little sister’s favorite color. It is the color of autumn Valenwood leaves, or Thalmor blood.

Etain sweeps the cloak around herself. In the mirror, she looks murderous. It looks as if no time has passed; as if the years have fallen away from her face, as if her eye is whole and her cheek is unpainted and a smile sits easy on her mouth. She looks young again. She looks the glorious rebel again.

This is not what Delphine wanted.

This is what she was always meant to do.

*****

Malborn is nervous. She talks to him for hours, and it does little to calm him. He was one of the Bosmer who hid from the purges, who simpered and cowered rather than fought. She cannot fault him this. It is practical, it is survival, it is  _running._

He lived in Falinesti. His family was killed a half-year after Etain’s family gave itself to the Wild Hunt. He did not know her, she did not know him. Had she stayed, had she not  _run_ and instead allowed the ritual to break her bones and force her into a monstrous shape, she might have eaten the Justiciar who dragged his wife from her bed. Or not. It is past.

She does not tell him this.

Etain gives him her bow, her arrows, her mask and her shrouding cowl. A Justiciar’s knife that will be used to slit Justiciar throats. Her notes, the ones that say  _by my hand and seal._ She gives him her armor, newly-made in its old design, never tested and barely worn. She gives him her cloak, red-lined and furred so that it might well be her little sister’s very skin. He will sneak these things into the Embassy for her. He will make sure they are returned to her.

In the washroom of the Solitude tavern, she dons the clothes that Dephine has provided. They itch. They don’t quite fit. She will look uncomfortable and nervous at the Thalmor party; but then, so will everyone. She will fit in. She will appear as  _one of them._

She looks in the mirror, and she does not know herself.

Carefully, she clasps an amulet around her neck. Carefully, hands trembling only a little, she re-draws the lines that trace over the lines of scar under her dead eye, the paint as red as a battle-flag.

*****

Elenwen’s Thalmor robes are beautifully fitted, and cling to every line of her tall frame. They are as black as midnight or Sithis’ void or burnt corpses or sin. The snow settles upon them and glitters like diamonds in the light of the pale full moon. She smiles at Etain. She shakes her hand.

Etain wishes to snatch her hand back as if it has been burned.

Her heart is hammering between her ribs. It’s as loud as the drums they’d used to summon the Hunt. Skipping, over and over. She can feel the amulet against her breastbone  _jump_ with each beat. Someone at the party will see it. Elenwen will see it, one of the armored guards will see it, Ondolemar will see it and grab her with his black-gloved hands and yank the chain from around her neck and hold out the amulet of Talos for all to see –

(It would give him an excuse to kill him. It would give her and excuse to kill them all. Like she always wanted, like her brothers and sisters and little sister only dreamed. It would be  _glorious.)_

Stupid of her, to wear a symbol of Talos to a Thalmor party. Even if it’s hidden under her clothes. Stupid. Rebellious. Brazen and wild. (There are things far more important than survival).

Her heart is beating like the paws of something after the kill.

Malborn draws her aside. Pulls her into the kitchen. He lies to the servant about her not feeling well, but it isn’t a lie because her skin feels hot and tight and prickling with sickness or with years-old cowardice and shame. Bars of moonlight pierce through the narrow windows like arrows. The door is between them and the party but Etain can still hear them, can still  _smell_ them, blood and magic and corruption, everything she was born to fight against and the fight that she has spent so long running from –

Her things are there. Her bow, fitting so well against her palms. Her wonderfully ironic Justiciar knife. Her armor that makes her look a perfect ghost of her younger self when she dons it. Her cloak.

Etain’s little sister had become something very like a  _wolf_ when the Wild Hunt took her; and Etain fancies that it is Aednat’s very skin, now, that she sweeps around herself, Aednat’s hide settling around her shoulder and fur brushing her jawline, Aednat’s blood against her old-new armor, Aednat’s warmth seeping into her flesh and bone and marrow.

 _(This is what we were born to do,_  her little sister had laughed. The leaves had thrown shifting shadows against the moonlight, and the fires had twisted their shapes, and in the woods beyond them there were Thalmor to slaughter, and beasts to turn into, and legends to become.)

The moon shines through the frost-rimmed windows of the Thalmor Embassy. The moon is full, and the night is pale as the ghost of that night past. Etain’s heart is a drum between her ribs. She can taste the premonition of blood on her tongue. Smell blood throughout the building, living,  _wet,_ sweet and enticing. Scent of stone, scent of metal and rich cloth, scent of sudden musk and fur, scent of the snow outside, things she should not be able to smell at all. Her hands are shaking and  _wrenching_ in her vision. The amulet of Talos rattles free. She draws the cloak tight around herself and falls to her knees under the weight of it and feels it take her – the moon, or the cloak, or _it,_ the inevitability of this, her bones snapping and her frame rearranging itself into what she  _must be._

She is herself and not herself.

She is in the heart of her enemy’s stronghold, and she is finally the monster they made her become.

She throws back her head, and she  _howls._


End file.
